A 20th-Century Master Scam

By Peter Landesman

Published: July 18, 1999

Correction Appended

Before John Myatt was sentenced to prison in February for his part as a forger in perhaps the most ingenious and damaging art con of the 20th century, he lived in a humble cottage on a narrow lane in the idyllic Staffordshire village of Sugnall, a three-hour drive northwest of London. To his neighbors, he appeared to be an unremarkable painter who had never established a style with which to spawn a career. He also wrote catchy pop tunes. If Myatt was known for anything, it was for a hit single, ''Silly Games,'' which made the British Top 40 in 1979.

But beginning in 1986, Myatt discovered that he could paint like the masters, and for the next nine years he led a secret and stunningly successful professional life as a painter. Braque, Matisse, Giacometti, Le Corbusier, all became part of his repertoire. He faked their styles with such virtuosity that his paintings passed for the real thing.

Then, one morning in September 1995, Myatt opened his front door to walk his young son to the school bus and found policemen in his yard. A plainclothes officer introduced himself as Jonathan Searle, a one-time painter, restorer and art historian, and now Detective Sergeant at Scotland Yard. Myatt, 50, sturdily built with the toughened hands of a laborer, nodded with resigned expectancy and invited the policemen inside for tea. Then he asked if could walk his son to the bus. While he did, the officers ransacked the house. Upon returning, Myatt stood in the studio with Searle, surveying the chaos. ''Do you like this one?'' Myatt asked, pointing to a competent if undistinguished drawing of his son. Searle nodded sympathetically, but was amazed by what looked to be paintings by Giacometti, Chagall, Braque and Dubuffet hanging about the room. Drawing pads lying around showed sketched studies for works by Giacometti, Le Corbusier and Ben Nicholson.

Myatt confessed on the spot to having drawn and painted what the police later said were about 200 forgeries in the styles of nine modern masters and personally delivering them to London, one roughly every six weeks, to a man by the name of John Drewe. Scotland Yard already suspected Drewe of masterminding the sale of Myatt's forgeries (and perhaps those of at least one other painter, still unidentified) through the auction houses Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips, as well as reputable dealers in London, Paris and New York. Then Myatt told Searle something the police didn't know: that he'd made most of the pictures out of an easily detectable household emulsion paint developed in the mid-60's, decades after most of the paintings were supposed to have been executed. In some cases, he used K-Y Jelly as a medium to add body and fluidity to his brushstrokes. Myatt had no idea how many millions had changed hands on account of his paintings, but estimated that he had earned as much as $165,000 over the years, some of which was deposited into a Swiss bank account in his name. The painter immediately offered to return the $30,000 he still had and to help snare Drewe.

Seven months later, on April 6, 1996, after recording conversations between the partners, detectives raided Drewe's home in the tony London suburb of Reigate, where they found hundreds of documents from the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tate Gallery and the Institute of Contemporary Art. Sitting on Drewe's kitchen table were two catalogues missing from the V. and A.'s National Art Library, still in the museum bag that Drewe had used to smuggle them out. There were rubber stamps bearing the authenticating seals of the Tate and of an order of monastic priests; receipts for the sale of paintings across continents going back decades; certificates of authenticity from the estates of Dubuffet and Giacometti; also the more mundane instruments of document forgery: scissors, razors, correction fluid, glue, tape.

As police and art experts soon discovered, forging masterpieces, as Myatt had done, was the least of it. Drewe's real genius lay in his ability to authenticate Myatt's works through bogus provenances -- the history of a work of art, from its creation through its purchasings and exhibitions to its current ownership, crucial elements in the sale of any picture. It would turn out that over the previous 10 years, Drewe had systematically infiltrated some of the most security-conscious art archives in the world, altering the provenances of genuine paintings to establish a lineage making way for Myatt's mostly unexceptional forgeries, and then seeding the collections with false records that provided the pictures with instant heritage. The scale of the corruption is unprecedented. The method is, too. Archivists may never know how much of their libraries have been compromised. Of the approximately 200 ''masterworks'' Myatt painted and Drewe sold, the police have located only 73. Drewe did more than slip phony pictures into a market hungry for important contemporary art -- he altered art history. The police call the con the ''the biggest contemporary art fraud the 20th century has seen.'' The British prosecution office declared Drewe a menace to Britain's cultural patrimony.

Peter Landesman is a painter, novelist and journalist. His second novel, Blood Acre, was published in January by Viking.

Correction: September 5, 1999, Sunday An article on July 18 about art forgery misidentified a painting whose authenticity is under question. The painting is not Van Gogh's ''Portrait of Dr. Gachet,'' purchased for $82.5 million by a Japanese collector in 1990, but an almost identical Van Gogh painting held by the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. The article also misstated accusations concerning Modigliani's widow. Modigliani never officially married his companion Jeanne Hebuterne; she died immediately after his death, and so could not have sold certificates of authentication to collectors. The article also misstated the circumstances surrounding the signing of blank pieces of paper by Salvador Dali. The blank papers were not signed on Dali's deathbed in 1989; according to an earlier notarized statement issued by the artist, the signings had ceased by Dec. 23, 1980. The errors were pointed out in readers' letters after the article appeared; this correction was delayed for checking and confirmation.